


Just Breathe

by WolfesPuppies



Series: Hurt/Comfort plotless ficlets [1]
Category: The Great Library Series - Rachel Caine
Genre: Chess, Chronic Illness, Coughing, Fluff, Gen, Mild Hurt/Comfort, No Plot/Plotless
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-29
Updated: 2020-01-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:27:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22468624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WolfesPuppies/pseuds/WolfesPuppies
Summary: In which Jess has a coughing fit, and Dario is nice to him.
Series: Hurt/Comfort plotless ficlets [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1627369
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17





	Just Breathe

**Author's Note:**

> There is no plot to this at all, just some good old illness whump. It comes from a prompt Maz (thegreatlibraryfangirl) gave me about 84 years ago, before Sword and Pen even came out.
> 
> The prompt was 'I've seen you walk off a bullet, why are you so shit with a cold?"

"I've seen you walk off a bullet, why are you so shit with a cold?" Dario grunts, heaving Jess up to lean on his shoulder. The other boy had tried to stand a moment before, and ended up slumped on the floor when his legs gave way.

"A bullet never came close to killing me." Jess mumbles, leaning his head heavily on Dario.

Dario raises an eyebrow as he helps Jess back onto the bed. "That's a lie scrubber, and you know it." He watches Jess carefully, noting with concern his even paler than usual complexion, the sweat beaded on his forehead from even that small exertion. “I distinctly remember you almost dying in Oxford.”

“Details.” Jess waves a feeble hand, then slaps it around on the bedside table until he finds the mask the Medica gave him for exactly these moments and takes a few deep breaths from it. It only takes a few seconds for the medication to do its work and for Jess’s colour to come back, but he still lets his head fall back on the pillow with a groan. “Fuck this.” He says with feeling. “It’s been months, why do I still feel so awful?”

“It’s going to take a while to get back to normal, I’m sure you’ve been told that by the Medica staff. Also, you have a cold. That’s bound to make it worse.”

“But it’s been _months!”_ Jess complains.

Dario shakes his head. “What were you getting up for anyway?” He’d walked into the bedroom just in time to catch Jess as he fell, intending to spend a few hours engaged in fierce battle on the chess board to while away the time waiting for Khalila to be done in her latest meeting. The life of Archivist involved far too many meetings for Dario’s liking, but Khalila is taking them with her usual good grace.

“I wanted some water, and Thomas didn’t hear me shout.”

“He’s asleep, that’s why.” Dario had knocked on the door more than a few times before peeking through the window and seeing Thomas fast asleep on the sofa, and had stopped knocking immediately. He sleeps little as it is, no point in waking him up to let Dario in, when Dario can utilise some of his new skills to pick the lock. It may have taken him longer than it would have taken Jess, but he still managed it.

“I’ll get it, stay there.”

It’s Jess’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “Don’t strain yourself, your highness.”

Dario responds with a rude gesture before leaving the room, returning minutes later with a glass.

“Why are you being so nice to me?” Jess is sitting up now, leaning against the headboard, but he takes the glass gratefully despite his words.

“Can’t destroy you in chess if you’re hacking your lungs up.” Dario says cheerfully.

“Ah, I see.”

Dario smirks before sitting at the table in the corner of the room. “You’re going to have to move to play though, setting it up on the bed is only asking for trouble.”

“Demands, demands.” Jess takes one more breath through his mask before getting up, this time managing to stay on his own two feet for long enough to make it across the room and slump into the chair opposite Dario. Even that is enough to set him coughing a little, and Dario eyes him, wondering if he should fetch the mask again.

“Don’t look at me like that.” Jess mumbles.

“Like what?”

“Like I’m about to keel over.”

“Well if you’ll stop throwing yourself at my feet, I’ll stop looking at you like that.”

“I thought you’d be used to that, your highness.”

“Fuck off, scrubber.”

The gentle teasing is long since routine for them, and it’s easy to fall back into the rhythm of it, trading barbs as they move chess pieces. They’re pretty equally matched, and the first game falls to Jess, the second to Dario.

“Best of three?”

“Get ready to lose again.”

“So confident.”

Dario is, in fact. He’s been playing with Khalila more and more in the past few months, in the quiet moments they can scrape together, and he knows he’s got better, and now he’s got the measure of Jess’s style again.

He’s about to move his piece when Jess sneezes and then coughs, once at first and then again, and again, and again. Jess doesn’t have to ask before Dario is moving across the room for his mask – not that he could, he’s coughing too hard to catch a proper breath, let alone talk.

“Don’t die on me, Brightwell.” There’s perhaps a little more concern in Dario’s voice than normal, not that he would ever admit it, and thankfully it seems Jess didn’t pick up on it either, pre-occupied as he is. It takes a few minutes for Jess to get his lungs back into working order, and when he does, he slumps forward, leaning his forehead on the table in front of him.

“I hate this.” The other boy sounds so utterly dejected that Dario is visited by a strange urge to put an arm around him. He resists, and instead squats down next to his chair.

“It’ll get better.”

“How do you know? What if it doesn’t?”

“Because you’re Jess Brightwell, you’ve never met a challenge you couldn’t face head on and charge down like a bull.”

Jess snorts, which turns into another cough, but this one doesn’t herald another fit. “Careful Dario, sounds like you like me.”

“God forbid.”

Jess finally raises his head. “Well then, your highness, I did promise to beat you in a final game.”

“You’re on, scrubber.”

Back on more comfortable footing, the game is a close match, but in the end Jess is the victor. His crow of celebration is interrupted by Thomas knocking on the door and entering, looking incredibly confused.

“Dario? When did you get here?”


End file.
